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Five years ago today I became a homeowner for the first time. It was a Monday, and it was the first day of a long, long, five year lock-in on my mortgage.

I collected the keys from the estate agent, as tradition dictates, and then zizzed around in the car. I opened the door with a sense of great excitement and walked into the admittedly fairly shabby flat that was to be my home. It hadn’t been shabby when I’d first looked around it. In fact, I still have the notes I wrote when I left after my first viewing. ‘Excellent decor,’ I wrote.

But on that first day there was melted wax spattered over the walls in two or three of the rooms. The grill pan was half an inch deep in fat, and there was something unidentifiable (sausage? bacon?) on the trellis.

The carpet was filthy. What he’d done in the month or two between me coming to see it and him moving out, I really don’t know. I didn’t particularly care, though, and although it was hard work I wasn’t so bothered that it took two months of sanding, painting and re-artexing to get it into a state fit for habitation before I could move in.

Not much has changed since then. The bathroom has gone from being blue to white to something creamy, and it’s had an extractor fan fitted, but that’s about it. Everything else is the same yellow I painted it back in 1998 - except the kitchen, of course, which remains a deep sea blue.

And so now I have to decide what I do next. Five years on I’m free of the lock in. I’m earning enough to buy a much larger place in which to live - with room for a spare bedroom or two, and perhaps a garage and garden.

Do I really want all that, though?

Admittedly it would be nice to have the extra space, but I think I’d miss much about living in a flat.

I like hearing the sound of footfall on the floor above as I drift off to sleep. It makes me think I am back in the family home and there are others about. I like the way I can look out to the roofs of the garages and watch as the rain bounces off them in a storm. I like the way I don’t have to mow my own lawn or pull weeds from the borders, but can instead rely on the bussed-in gardeners to do the whole road on my behalf. I like the way that when I step out of my front door I am in a carpeted hallway, not on the kerb of a busy dirty road.

So I’ll not be rushing into a move. For the moment I’ll stay here - at least for the winter. It’s so much nicer here in the summer, when the sun streams in through the back windows. I know that if I wait until then it will sell far quicker, and by then I’ll have made up my mind.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 26th, 2003 at 11:33 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.